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NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- Inflation took a bigger bite out of consumers' wallets over the last 12 months, with September marking the biggest rise in three years. But at the same time, monthly price increases are starting to slow. The Consumer Price Index, the government's key measure of inflation at the retail level, jumped 3.9% in September from the year before. Higher food and energy prices again were the biggest culprits, with food 4.7% more expensive than a year earlier, and energy prices jumping 19.3%. Even core CPI, which strips out volatile food and energy prices, posted a 2% gain...

COLUMBUS, Ohio (Reuters) - The economy is growing so slowly that it will take years to wrench lofty unemployment rates back to normal levels, Cleveland Federal Reserve Bank President Sandra Pianalto said on Friday. Speaking to a community bankers' group, she said growth in 2011 was likely to be about two percent and forecast it will rise only to three percent in 2012 and 2013 -- unlikely to make much of a dent in the current 9.1 percent jobless rate. "If we're going to dig ourselves out of the hole that we're in and begin to drive down the unemployment...

Twenty years ago this Friday a tragic car accident in Crown Heights Brooklyn escalated into a pogrom against the Jewish people. The media gives it a politically correct description, violence between the area’s Blacks and Jews. However the violence was not two-sided. The Crown Heights riot was an attack on the Jews by the neighborhood’s Caribbean community, fueled in part by Al Sharpton, now an MSNBC host and adviser to President Obama. Black Antisemitism in the Summer of 1991 Jews were a key part of the civil rights movement in the 1960s, when the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. made...

Addressing the ceremony on Bernauer Street, famously divided by the Wall and now site of a memorial, Mayor Wowereit said the capital was remembering the "saddest day in its recent history". "It is our common responsibility to keep alive the memories and pass them on to the next generation, to maintain freedom and democracy and to do everything so that such injustices may never happen again," he said. At a ceremony at a former crossing-point, President Wulff said the wall had been "an expression of fear" of those who created it.

A few weeks after the U.S. city of Detroit was ravaged by 1967 race riots in which 43 people died, I was shown around the wrecked areas by a black reporter named Joe Strickland.He said: ‘Don’t you believe all that stuff people here are giving media folk about how sorry they are about what happened. When they talk to each other, they say: “It was a great fire, man!” ’I am sure that is what many of the young rioters, black and white, who have burned and looted in England through the past few shocking nights think today.

Ten years ago this month, Portugal rejected the conventional approach to drug policy–more laws, stiffer prison sentences, more police–and went the other way by decriminalizing all drugs, even cocaine and heroin. The drug warriors predicted a disaster. They said drug use would spike and there would be a public health crisis. That did not happen. As Glenn Greenwald showed in a 2009 Cato report, Portugal is doing better than before and in many respects is doing better than other countries in the European Union

Former Russian Interpol head says terror threat in country worse than in Israel; 4 top transportation officials fired over airport bombing. The level of terror threats in Russia is higher than that in Israel," former head of Russian Interpol Vladimir Ovchinsky stated during an interview with Novye Ivestia newspaper Wednesday. "Our war is more intensive than the one between the Israelis and the Palestinians," he added, saying pessimistically that "The war in the Caucuses may last a hundred years." There has been no claim of responsibility for the bombing that occurred at Moscow's Domodedovo Airport, killing 35 people and wounding...

The woolly mammoth, extinct for thousands of years, could be brought back to life in as little as four years thanks to a breakthrough in cloning technology. Previous efforts in the 1990s to recover nuclei in cells from the skin and muscle tissue from mammoths found in the Siberian permafrost failed because they had been too badly damaged by the extreme cold. But a technique pioneered in 2008 by Dr. Teruhiko Wakayama, of the Riken Centre for Developmental Biology, was successful in cloning a mouse from the cells of another mouse that had been frozen for 16 years.

IBM has announced its fifth annual Next Five in Five – a list of five technologies that the company believes “have the potential to change the way people work, live and play over the next five years.” While there are no flying cars or robot servants on the list, there are holographic friends, air-powered batteries, personal environmental sensors, customized commutes and building-heating computers.3D telepresence It may not be a flying car, but it’s definitely one we’ve seen in sci-fi movies before – the ability to converse with a life-size holographic image of another person in real time. The futurists at...

<p>US Treasuries suffered their biggest two-day sell-off since the collapse of Lehman Brothers, following a torrid month that has seen borrowing costs for western governments soar.</p> <p>Germany, Japan and the US have all seen their benchmark market interest rates rise by more than a quarter in the past month while the UK’s has risen by nearly a fifth.</p>

MONTGOMERY -- Republicans on Tuesday appeared to take control of the Alabama Legislature, with top Republicans claiming to have close to 60 seats in the 105-member House of Representatives and perhaps 22 seats in the 35-member Senate.

SALT LAKE CITY — In many ways, just looking at Elizabeth and her sister Mary Katherine today tells the story of how long "Elizabeth Smart" has been a household name throughout the nation, and how long their family has waited for justice to be served. Around the world, the picture of Elizabeth in her "missing" poster, of her in her yellow vest jacket with her hair pulled back, became ingrained in people's minds.

SAO PAULO (AP) - A man in northeastern Brazil is recovering after surgeons removed a 4-inch (10-centimeter) blade that had been stuck in his head for three years following a bar fight. Edeilson Nascimento, a 29-year-old tire repairman, tells reporters Friday he is feeling great after the three-hour surgery earlier this week. Excerpted per FR posting rules.

Last night’s “Parker-Spitzer” saw the lowest numbers yet for the program and the show did little to help the one that followed on the schedule — “Larry King Live” which had its worst numbers in more than 10 years. In its sixth outing, “Parker-Spitzer” drew 311,000 Total Viewers and 86,000 A25-54 viewers. That’s lower than the previous low for the time period set by Campbell Brown earlier this year. (332,000 / 87,000). Last week, Parker-Spitzer finished fourth in the time period averaging 465,000 Total Viewers and 124,000 A25-54. At 9pmET, “Larry King Live” put up its lowest A25-54 demo viewership...

Earliest evidence of fungus that takes over ants' behaviour for its own ends found by scientists. The oldest evidence of a fungus that turns ants into zombies and makes them stagger to their death has been uncovered by scientists. The gruesome hallmark of the fungus's handiwork was found on the leaves of plants that grew in Messel, near Darmstadt in Germany, 48m years ago. The finding shows that parasitic fungi evolved the ability to control the creatures they infect in the distant past, even before the rise of the Himalayas. The fungus, which is alive and well in forests today,...

Let me first always remind readers that polls are a snapshot in time. Two years from now, President Obama could be sitting on top of the world politically. But for now, he has lost all but 38 percent approval from the critical "independent" American voters. They're the ones that gave him the presidency. He appears headstrong in his determination to show the nation what a disastrous presidency looks like. Pundits often point to the presidency of Jimmy Carter as the modern example of a failed leader. It is no secret that I have, despite my former years as an active...

descent into irrelevancy...on King's inability (much the same as his fellow CNN hosts) to compete in the ratings with Fox News and MSNBC. At 9 p.m., the time slot King used to dominate, he's a "distant third" behind Rachel Maddow and Sean Hannity. King now averages 725,000 viewers—that's about half the audience he had during the most recent presidential election; he was drawing 1.34 million in the first quarter of 2009. CNN president Jonathan Klein declined to comment on King's contract, which is up for renewal next June.

A mobile phone company has suspended the number 0888 888 888 – after every single person assigned to it died in the last 10 years. The first owner Vladimir Grashnov – the former CEO of Bulgarian mobile phone company Mobitel which issued the number – died of cancer in 2001 aged just 48. Despite a spotless business record there were persistent rumours that his cancer had been caused by a business rival using radioactive poisoning. The number then passed to Bulgarian mafia boss, Konstantin Dimitrov, who was gunned down in 2003 by a lone assassin in the Netherlands during a...

CORVALLIS, Ore. – The major earthquakes that devastated Chile earlier this year and which triggered the catastrophic Indonesian tsunami of 2004 are more than just a distinct possibility to strike the Pacific Northwest coast of the United States, scientists say. There is more than a one-in-three chance that it will happen within the next 50 years. New analyses by Oregon State University marine geologist Chris Goldfinger and his colleagues have provided fresh insights into the Northwest’s turbulent seismic history – where magnitude 8.2 (or higher) earthquakes have occurred 41 times during the past 10,000 years. Those earthquakes were thought to...

The NY Times has the story; the longtime crusading state Attorney General (he was Eliot Spitzer before Eliot Spitzer was), Richard Blumenthal has sometimes just implied it, but on other occasions (including one the NYT has on video) he’s said outright that he served in the Marines in Vietnam, when in fact he enlisted in a stateside Marine Reserve unit only near the end of the war after obtaining five draft deferments to pursue his legal education. The deferments are nothing to be proud of, but they’re a common enough story among male political leaders of that generation in both...

CHICAGO (AP) - The iconic redheaded orphan Annie is ending her time on newspaper comics pages after 85 years. Tribune Media Services announced Thursday that it will cease syndication of the "Annie" strip on June 13.

Now that our government is daily dealing in trillions of dollars, my question is ... How big is a trillion?

Met Office figures recorded a December-to-February mean UK temperature of just 1.51C, while the 1971-2000 average is 3.7C After suffering snow, sleet, rain and consistently freezing temperatures, the knowledge that the Met Office has officially recognised winter 2009-10 as the coldest in 31 years brings with it a certain grim satisfaction. Provisional figures from the forecaster show the UK winter ‑ which in forecasting terms lasts from the start of December until the end of February ‑ has been the harshest, in temperature terms, since 1978-79.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Unemployment rates will likely peak in most U.S. cities in 2010, but it will be many more years before jobless rates hit their lows of the last decade, a report released by a U.S. mayors group shows. In some areas, such as California's central valley and cities in Nevada, unemployment rates will stay at or above 10 percent through 2013, according to the report published on Wednesday by the U.S. Conference of Mayors .. The mayors group released the report a day ahead of a meeting with U.S. President Barack Obama in which it will seek federal...

An Indian villager burrowed for 14 years with a hammer and chisel to cut a tunnel through a mountain so that his neighbours could reach nearby fields and he could park his truck outside his home. Ramchandra Das, 53, who lives in eastern Bihar state, carved a 10m-long, 4m-wide tunnel through the hill range from his village of Kewati. Das took up the Herculean task after villagers found the 7km trek over the mountain increasingly arduous. When the authorities refused to help to cut the journey time, Das began carving his way through the earth in the direction of the...

I just let an anniversary go by unnoticed. I became a member of Free Republic on November 8, 1999. At that point in my life, I was a sophomore in college. Now, I'm a youngish professional with more than my fair share of grey hair already, and less than 8 months from reaching the "big" three-zero birthday. First, I want to thank Jim Robinson and all those who maintain this wonderfully addictive website. I get most of my news off of here. It is such a clearinghouse for what's going on in there world But more than that, it's a...

Ancient ale Prehistoric yeast takes beer drinkers back millions of yearsBy Suzanne Bohan Contra Costa Times Sep 24, 2009‎ GUERNEVILLE, Calif. - Inside a stainless-steel tank at a brew pub here overlooking the redwood-rimmed Russian River, a 45-million-year-old yeast proves its mettle. And the remarkably resilient prehistoric microbe hasn't just garnered a devoted pack of Fossil Fuels Beer fans, it's also providing palpable proof of the tenacity of life on this planet. When the Australian-born owner of Stumptown Brewery, Peter Hackett, first learned of the ancient yeast, he doubted this long-extinct strain would ferment anything drinkable. It took the urging...

On Wednesday, August 12, a man holding a sign that said “Death to Obamaâ€� at a town hall meeting in Maryland was detained and turned over to the Secret Service for questioning, which is pursuing an investigation into charging him with threatening the president. As well they should. I fully and absolutely agree with this arrest, since anyone who threatens the president is breaking the law and should be prosecuted. It doesn’t matter that Obama was not at the meeting nor that the man was unarmed: the threat all on its own is a federal crime, according to the United...

According to their forecast, the unemployment rate will be at 10 percent through 2011. Three years after that, the jobless rate will have dropped only to 8 percent. And a decade from now, that rate will still be floating above 6 percent. Diane Swonk, an economist with Mesirow Financial, said she tends to agree with such bleak forecasts of jobless recoveries. "This is the exact debate that's going on in economics today," she said. "Because we have a severe recession, will we get a nice bounce? Or are we stuck in a period of slow, muted recovery, particularly in the...

WASHINGTON – The Pentagon presented a grim portrait of the Afghanistan war Thursday, offering no assurances about how long Americans will be fighting there or how many U.S. combat troops it will take to win. Defeating the Taliban and al-Qaida will take "a few years," Defense Secretary Robert Gates said, with success on a larger scale in the desperately poor country a much longer proposition. He acknowledged that the Taliban has a firm hold on parts of the country President Barack Obama has called vital to U.S. security.

Obama said in an op-ed posted early Sunday on The Washington Post's Web site that his $787 billion stimulus program was not expected to return the economy to full health, but to provide a boost that would stop the free fall. "So far, it has done that," the president wrote. "It was, from the start, a two-year program, and it will steadily save and create jobs as it ramps up over this summer and fall." He said his stimulus plan must be given time to work and appealed to Americans, who are increasingly uneasy with rising unemployment and ballooning budget...

WASHINGTON, May 19: The US secretary of state acknowledged on Tuesday that Washington had not been consistent in its dealings with Islamabad. Talking to reporters at the Foreign Press Centre and the White House, Hillary Clinton said ‘it is fair to say that our policy towards Pakistan over the last 30 years has been incoherent. I don’t know any other word’

Another day, another outrage from the Obama Administration. OK,how about a little diversion? Who is the posting champ of FreeRepublic? Who has posted the most number of threads? The most number of replies? Who has been here the longest(other than JimRob,of course!)? Check "Account" at the top of the page and let us know.

(IsraelNN.com) IDF soldiers managed to capture hundreds of terror suspects during Operation Cast Lead in Gaza. One of them, 20-year-old Mohammed Amazi, was revealed to be one of Hamas' more senior fighters. Parts of Amazi's interrogation were published this week by the Hebrew-language Maariv. Amazi told security forces that he was recruited by Hamas at age 12 as he left a mosque in his hometown of Jabalia. At first his participation in the group consisted only of daily Koran classes, he said. However, at age 13 he was officially sworn in to the terrorist group, and soon began actively supporting...

WASHINGTON – President-elect Barack Obama says the nation probably faces huge deficits for years to come, but heavy spending is needed now to spur the economy. .. "Potentially we've got trillion-dollar deficits for years to come, even with the economic recovery that we are working on."

MONTPELIER, Vt. - The nuclear energy watchdog group New England Coalition has been waiting a long time, a very long time, for the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission to pay attention to its concerns. The agency has just replied to a petition concerning safety and radiation exposure that the coalition filed in 1975. "No petition before its time," said NRC spokesman Eliot Brenner. As if being ignored for three decades weren't enough, the NRC denied the group's petition. The coalition had been urging federal regulators to consider, as part of their environmental review of the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant, the...

Upright Walking Began 6 Million Years Ago Newswise — A shape comparison of the most complete fossil femur (thigh bone) of one of the earliest known pre-humans, or hominins, with the femora of living apes, modern humans and other fossils, indicates the earliest form of bipedalism occurred at least six million years ago and persisted for at least four million years. William Jungers, Ph.D., of Stony Brook University, and Brian Richmond, Ph.D., of George Washington University, say their finding indicates that the fossil belongs to very early human ancestors, and that upright walking is one of the first human characteristics...

CONCORD, N.H. (AP) - Dozens of gay and lesbian couples entered into civil unions in New Hampshire in the early moments of New Year’s Day as a new state law legalized the partnerships after midnight. Organizers said they checked in 37 couples for an outdoor ceremony on the plaza of the New Hampshire Statehouse—the building where the law was adopted and signed in 2007. Participants bundled up against below- freezing temperatures. “We’ve been together 20 years; we’ve been waiting for this moment for 20 years; finally the state will recognize us as we are,� said Julie Bernier, who posed for...

Top 11 Warmest Years On Record Have All Been In Last 13 Years ScienceDaily (Dec. 13, 2007) — The decade of 1998-2007 is the warmest on record, according to data sources obtained by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). The global mean surface temperature for 2007 is currently estimated at 0.41°C/0.74°F above the 1961-1990 annual average of 14.00°C/57.20°F. The University of East Anglia and the Met Office's Hadley Centre have released preliminary global temperature figures for 2007, which show the top 11 warmest years all occurring in the last 13 years. The provisional global figure for 2007 using data from January...

The moment she spotted the young woman in the puffy silver jacket, Ginger Mayes screamed her daughter's name and rushed the escalator, oblivious of the other passengers streaming into the baggage-claim area at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. Zarminah Al-Rabiah stepped off the escalator and into her mother's arms. The women clutched each other in a minutes-long hug, sobbing and then laughing.

A motorist in Helsingborg has been ordered to pay back over a quarter of a million kronor in disability benefits after claiming to be blind for a period of ten years. The person in question was caught driving a car on three separate occasions while at the same time receiving benefits totalling 268,000 kronor ($38,500). The Swedish Social Insurance Agency (Försäkringskassan) explained its decision to request reimbursement in a letter to the individual concerned: "While investigating your case in the autumn of 2006, we received information suggesting that you cannot be considered sightless.

The Royal Navy has unveiled its largest and most powerful attack submarine, a month before the over-budget, overdue vessel is due be launched. Military officials say HMS Astute will be able to circumnavigate the planet without surfacing, and its nuclear reactor is designed to last for the vessel's 25-year operational life, meaning it will never need to be refueled. An artist's impression of the Astute class submarineInside the Astute class submarine

Scenario: Jack pulls into school parking lot with rifle in gun rack. 1956 - Vice Principal comes over, takes a look at Jack's hunting rifle, goes to his own car and gets his favorite rifle to show Jack. 2006 - School goes into lockdown, FBI called, Jack is handcuffed and hauled off to Federal prison and never sees his truck, gun or family again. Counselors are called in for all the traumatized students and teachers. FOX, ABC, CBS &NBC are on site within 5 minutes. ++++++++++++++++++++++ Scenario: Best friends Johnny and Mark get into a fist fight after school. 1956...

Mystery of the Missing Heat: Upper ocean has cooled slightly in recent years, despite warming climate Sid Perkins Between 2003 and 2005, the top layers of the world's oceans cooled slightly, but scientists aren't sure where the heat went. According to climate data gathered worldwide, 2003, 2004, and 2005 are three of the five warmest years since reliable record keeping of global air temperatures began more than a century ago. However, oceanographic surveys suggest that on average, the upper 750 meters of the world's ice-free oceans cooled about 0.03°C during that 3-year period. This cooling reverses an oceanic-warming trend observed...

Catastrophic mudslide could last 100 years, say scientists · Land in East Java likely to collapse as thousands flee· Attempts to seal channels will 'probably not succeed' John Aglionby in Jakarta Tuesday September 26, 2006 The Guardian (UK) Smoke rises from the site of the mudslide in East Java. Photograph: Vinai Dithajohn/EPA Mud, gas and boiling water that have been gushing out of the ground in East Java since May, submerging half a dozen villages and 20 factories, could continue for a century with "catastrophic consequences", European experts said yesterday. Efforts to seal the channels through which the mud is...

Seeds 200 years old breathe again By Richard Black Environment correspondent, BBC News website The unknown acacia species is now half a metre tall Seeds which have been stored away since the time of George III have been persuaded into new life. Scientists from the Millennium Seed Bank, operated by the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, have induced seeds from three species to germinate. They had been brought to Britain from South Africa by a Dutch merchant in 1803, and were found in a notebook stored in the National Archives. Given this history, the team said it was surprised by...

BISBEE — A Mexican man pleaded no contest Tuesday to charges he stole a pickup truck and dragged a Sheriff’s deputy during a March traffic stop in Huachuca City, breaking the deputy’s ankle in the process. Hugo Rodr’guez Pelagio, 24, of Tangancicuaro, Michoacan state, will serve three years in prison and pay up to $200 in restitution as part of a plea agreement with the state. According to an arrest report from the Sheriff’s Department, Rodr’guez Pelagio was stopped at about 2:38 a.m. on March 21 as he was driving with an unidentified passenger along Highway 90 northbound in a...

NASHVILLE, Tenn. - A convicted murderer who escaped from a Michigan psychiatric facility in 1976 was back behind bars Thursday after living most of his 30 years on the run as an otherwise law-abiding family man in Tennessee, authorities said. Thomas Ball, 76, was arrested at his Nashville home Wednesday morning, Deputy U.S. Marshal Danny Shelton said. Ball had been using the name Thomas Fry and had run a storage business near Nashville for years with a woman he called his wife, Shelton said. After she died last year, he turned to the government for financial help, and that led...

WASHINGTON, Sept. 12, 2006 – Five years after military recruiting hit the ceiling after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, recruiting remains solid, with every service meeting its active-duty recruiting goal for the 15th consecutive month. Recruiting and retention statistics for August, just released by the Defense Department, show the Army, Navy, Marine Corps and Air Force all meeting or exceeding both their monthly as well as year-to-date recruiting goals for the year. At the same time, retention remains solid across the board, with all services expected to meet their retention goals for the fiscal year, officials said. During August,...

It may well take 20 years. But al-Qaeda's days are numbered Five years after 9/11, Osama bin Laden waits in vain for a Muslim 'awakening'. The lure of the West is just too powerful a force Jason Burke Sunday September 10, 2006 The Observer (UK) Tomorrow will mark five years since the attacks of 11 September 2001. If one generation knew where they were when mankind first walked on the moon, another knows where they were when the Twin Towers crumbled. And they know where they were when coalition troops first entered Iraq. And when the bombs exploded in London...